Thursday, December 1, 2016

Breaking radio silence, I wanted to let some concerned friends and
family know that we are OK.
We have had a series of disappointing
medical appointments for Ernie, resulting in a lot of not much happening,
and we are coming out of an extended paperwork-and-logistics crunch on
long-term care for Ernie's mom.

Ernie's mom has
late-stage cancer, and is medically considered beyond treatment (which she resisted for years anyway).

In the unfortunate event that you are going through something similar, here are some resources we've found useful:

- If you are doing OK, medically and financially, but starting to slow down a bit, Meals on Wheels
has been surprisingly helpful in helping elders stay independent in
their own homes. Not just food, but a daily visit from a friendly face, and in my grandma's case they were also able to call a designated number if she didn't answer the door. (Which means family could visit when convenient, but didn't need to hover.)

- Long Term Care:
Illness
is expensive, and so is long-term care.
One website showing places to apply for food and medical help:http://www.in.gov/fssa/dfr/2691.htm
A lot of communities have other resources, such as private organizations or funds. A good local social worker should know a lot of them.

Medicaid can help with long-term care, based on financial and functional eligibility, they may offer anything from a few hours a
week of light household help, to 24-hour care in a nursing home.

- Power of Attorney:
If a person becomes incapacitated, or just starts having trouble doing paperwork in a timely way, they may need to designate a trusted person to have access to their affairs. (This is kind of like adding someone to your joint bank account - an untrustworthy person can really mess up your life.)
There are
lots of generic POA forms online. You can X out sections that don't apply. Consult a lawyer if needed. A power of attorney is not the same as a will, and may not allow access to affairs or resources after a person dies.

Hospice: comfort care, including in-home or residential nursing:http://www.hospicedirectory.org/http://www.nhpco.org/find-hospice
(Ask
your doctor what hospice programs they work with/recommend. Generally,
your doctor must confirm your eligibility (within about 6 months of end
of life), but there are no limits to how long you can receive care.
The hospice coordinators or social workers can help you find out what's
covered by your insurance. They are incredibly helpful, compassionate,
and well-informed. Even if you don't sign up now, they may be able to
walk you through your best options and local resources.)

What Happens When Someone Dies?
If
you are young and lucky, you may never have been present at another
person's death. What do you do?
If the dead person was on Hospice, you call the
Hospice main number, and generally a nurse will come out to handle things.
If not on Hospice, the
death must be reported to the county Medical Examiner, usually by calling
the sherriff's office at 911. Don't move the body until the medical examiner releases it. (Sometimes they just ask a few questions over the phone, depending who's there, but usually a medical person has to verify the death in person.)
It's a good idea to make arrangements ahead of time (funeral home, body donation, or whatever), because there are limits to how long you can discuss these things, or second-guess the person's wishes, after death. Funeral homes will provide a price list on request; both basics and extras can be expensive. Although it can be depressing to contemplate, making decisions ahead of time is a huge weight off friends and family afterwards.

- Informal Social Support and Reciprocity:
We owe a big debt of gratitude to the church family,
friends, and neighbors, all of whom have been providing a lot of day-to-day help
for Ernie's mom. Most of them say that she has done the same for them, or for other friends and families they know.
Most of the above programs, and many others, accept donations or volunteers. My gran'ma and I enjoyed donating boxes of fresh fruit from her backyard trees to Meals on Wheels; another friend enjoyed delivering meals by bicycle.

We all make our own beds, and lie in them.
There are worse things than toughing out a deadly illness in your own
home, on your own terms, with daily visits from friends and family.
...
Not useful, in our opinion:
- sales websites promising to cure your cancer in a few easy steps (and turning the blame back on you if you don't follow their impossible steps exactly, or if following their steps caused other and possibly worse health problems)
- faith healers who tell a person casually over the phone that they are healed, regardless of medical circumstances, or any discernible divine intervention
- people who snoop or gossip about someone's situation without actually helping.

We occasionally have the benign problem of 'too many cooks,' where well-meaning people see a need, and try to do something about it (like "re-organize" or shuffle important papers). But if it is not a task they can complete (often because it's not really their job), messing with it can make things worse.

One of the most difficult things as a care giver is to recognize when to leave well enough alone.
Being present, and listening, are often more important than bustling or effort. Between Ernie's medical appointments and our physical distance, we're not able to be present as much as his mom might prefer. So a lot of what we can do is by phone, fax, email, and second-hand.

I often wonder whether I'm doing enough, whether I'm doing too much. I am in this as Ernie's proxy; I often talk to his mother more than he does. And I may be stepping on toes.

There are a lot of emotionally difficult, physically uncomfortable things that happen when a person needs care. Everyone has their own opinions about how things ought to be done. I want us to hear about it if care isn't adequate - and I also want Ernie's mom to be allowed to make her own decisions as long as she is able. Friendly nagging or insisting can quickly become harassment - or just add to the indignity and confusion of an older adult having to ask for help.

Between consenting adults, "No" means No. Either the care giver, or the person receiving care, can decline if they are uncomfortable. (Physical, emotional, or time limits; inappropriate medical training or skill; or a private reason or personal preference are all adequate grounds for declining.)

There are specific legal and medical situations where a person's right to self-determination may be over-ruled. But unless and until you are appointed to make decisions on someone else's behalf, that is not your job.

I keep reminding myself that we are all doing the best we can - and not even the most perfect care can make a loved one immortal.
Hold onto the love, compassion, and gratitude that brought you together in the first place.

Monday, August 22, 2016

In the
Western states, our summer dry season is approaching its
end. (Sometimes in a fiery burst of heat. Our sympathy to the folks
currently threatened by active wild fires; we're feeling very lucky NOT to be fighting big wildfires yet in the Okanogan County this year, for once.)

If you need a woodshed, or a bigger or better woodshed, to hold all that lovely wood you've harvested and split this spring, it
would be a REALLY good end-of-August project for this week.

Properly dried and stored fire wood
can provide more than double the same heating energy as
damp or green wood. (Soaking-wet wood can act as a fire
extinguisher, meaning dry wood is infinitely more effective as a
heating fuel.)

A good woodshed is
not just storage out of the rain – it's a clever wood-drying
machine. The shape and structure promote great ventilation, often
using slatted sides or racks, and sometimes featuring dividers so you
can run two years' supply side-by-side with ventilation between each
row. Good wood sheds keep not just rain but groundwater and
evaporating moisture from remaining anywhere near your precious fuel
stores.

A good wood shed
should be so well-ventilated it's almost windy inside. If your
climate is very humid and foggy, you might need to consider a design with some heating function to dry the air - perhaps an enclosed shed whose metal or clear plastic roof helps it functions like a solar dehydrator, or a storage attached to your heated space such as a mud-room, lean-to, or the back corner of a
shop or barn.

(In most climates, these heated spaces are not necessary to achieve dry wood, and
the risk of bringing wood-eating bugs into a large wooden building
may outweigh the convenience and drying speed associated with heated
spaces.)

Common structures
that can double as wood-drying storage include a well-ventilated
greenhouse, barn, daylight basement, or a temporary fabric
structure such as a canopy tent or suspended rain-fly tarp.

Bad ideas for wood sheds include almost all tarped-over woodpiles on the ground. Unfortunately, these often act more as
moisture-trapping mushroom farms than as dry storage. Basements are
another location that may be useable for storing already-dried wood,
but may be too damp or lack the necessary ventilation for a reasonably fast initial
drying and curing process.

If you would not
leave books or linens in your wood storage, for fear of damp and mold,
consider improving it.

We are also in the
middle of building an extra-big carport, using the largest approved
size of “bow-truss” from some university extension service barn plans we found online.

The main motive for this project is actually ice-free
access to our vehicles while Ernie recovers from an elective surgery
this fall. But I'm definitely looking forward to stacking a little
bit of extra firewood in here for convenient access this winter. (and possibly to creating an entryway/greenhouse....)

Here are some great
resources for building an inexpensive, spacious woodshed:

A lot has happened since I wrote the posts for May - including some lovely professional opportunities, re-connecting with old friends and colleagues, and making new memories.

But in the last couple of months, the excitement about bringing out The Book has been overshadowed by health concerns. We have two relatively urgent medical upheavals in our lives right now. (Along with the usual number of chronic concerns, if there is such a thing as "usual number" of those.)

One is the news that Ernie's mother Peggy has had a serious downturn in her longstanding battle with cancer. The other is that after trying a lot of alternatives, we finally have been referred to an excellent surgeon, who says there is a very good chance of a successful below-the-knee amputation for Ernie. This is a HUGE decision, but it's one that Ernie has already researched, and made up his mind a few years ago was the next logical step to move forward.

(The weeks between organizing Peggy's hospice care, and going to meet this new surgeon and find out what was possible for Ernie, have been a VERY difficult time to stay focused on work tasks. But now I seem to be back in the saddle for logistics and follow-through.)

If Ernie's insurance gives the green light for this surgery, we need to allow for a year to 18 months of post-surgery recovery and adaptation. After that, we get to discover our "new normal."
We can look forward to possible reductions in pain (currently between 7-10 pain level most days), and significant reduction in the infections he's been experiencing the past year and a half.
I hope we can enjoy a lot more water-sports (many amputees are active kayakers, sailors, and swimmers), and better options for bicycling again. Most travel should become significantly less painful and risky, as well, though we may need to be stricter in our criteria for ADA-accessible destinations.

We have also been warned to expect that construction, especially lifting, twisting, and balance-type activities, are extremely difficult after any leg amputation. The prosthetic socket represents sort of a bendy break in the lower leg, which is a weak point under sideways stresses such as torque, bending, or shear (unstable as well as very uncomfortable). The surgeon and prosthetist we talked to have worked with a number of drywallers, builders, firefighters, and fishermen, and these folks rarely return to the same work after an amputation. (The longest example the surgeon has seen lasted about 2 years at drywalling, and that was a guy who was highly motivated to keep supporting his family. It was just extremely difficult to do that kind of work.)
The most successful people in adapting to life after amputation are good "outside the box" thinkers, who can find new ways to perform familiar tasks now that their body has a new shape and new limits. We all agreed that Ernie is very likely to remain well above average activity levels; he is intrinsically highly motivated, and highly adaptable.

You can imagine this involves a lot of discussion about our work and life together. We may be sending me alone to honor some existing commitments, and identifying and cancelling those optional things that have to give way to higher priorities.

Ernie wants to "support me" in going ahead and doing things without him, things that might take my mind off all this, like fire fighting, book signing, and scheduled events where I get to shine as a featured expert.
However, I find fame is a poor substitute for creative partnership. Performing under the limelight doesn't come naturally to me when my heart's priorities are on what's going on back home.

I've resumed mutually-supportive dates with two of our local friends, and phone check-ins with a couple of family members. A few regular people who ask me how it's going once a week, and especially those who don't mind taking the time to discuss detailed work logistics, family concerns, and other problems, are much appreciated.

We had a lovely "angel visit" from our friend Tyler this weekend, who helped with construction (see next post) as well as prep and playing with natural plasters and goat cheese.

I'm currently organizing my chore lists, so I can delegate somewhat in case of offers from other angels with time to spare.

Sunday, May 22, 2016

Among my earliest memories is a beloved and familiar voice singing a lullaby in my childhood bedroom. The warm coverlet with its broad plaid stripes in shades of brown, orange, gold, and green. Darkness obscuring the shapes in the wallpaper. And the mellow, sweet voice, familiar and unforgettable:

"Way out yonder, in the meadow,
All the pretty little horses...
Dapples and greys, pintos and bays,
all the pretty little horses!
When you wake, you shall have
All the pretty little horses..."

I'm sure there was a "go to sleep" in there somewhere, but it was lost among all the pretty horses.

With a godmother like Mary Ann, it would have been difficult to avoid going horse crazy. She was in her teens when I was born, and I remember a later visit to Portland where she carefully offered me a selection of her almost-best model horses. I probably still have the grey appaloosa, with the same broken foot that it had when she gave it to me, and its beautifully detailed conformation. Appaloosas were always her favorite. I preferred bays as a child (to the point where my parents got me a Lone Ranger Silver horse toy with articulated legs, but repainted it brown with a black mane and tail for me). I had a Grizzly Adams donkey whose muzzle I shaved after it became apparent to me that real horse-kind had velvety muzzles, not fuzzy hairy ones.

When I was about 10, Mary Ann was instrumental in setting me up with a skilled, pragmatic, and foxy riding trainer called Christina Traunweiser. Some years my parents would pay for lessons, some years I would work for them. The process of mucking out stalls every weekend in my formative years means a shovel is still the tool I know best (aside from paper and pencil).

Mary Anne teaching a horse and rider

Unlike Mary Anne, I eventually got over the "I want a pony" feeling. I know exactly how much work a horse is, and unless I achieve a rare state of rural life and surplus income (or have work suitable for a horse or mule to earn its keep), I am more than content to share the pleasures of other people's horses.

Mary Ann finally got her ponies when she married Craig Stevens, and now teaches classical equitation in Snohomish, WA. (I delight in hearing stories of my nieces, and my mother, getting a riding lesson from Mary Ann on their visits.)

The music continued too. I loved singing together at family gatherings, and Mary Ann and my dad were definitely ringleaders in that regard.

And although glittery pink ballgowns were not really her style, she did play "dress you up for the ball" one school-shopping trip when we blew our budget on a formal dress jacket instead of the expected jeans. I wore it to a variety of dances and formal occasions for years.

....

Wicked Evil StepmotherKacy claims to be our W.E.S., but she is not very good at it. She married my father at a time when all of us kids were lining up to get married, and just so happened to have ten years as a professional wedding planner under her belt. And she's a highly skilled photographer.

(Since she doesn't love being in front of the camera very much, I was just going to represent her with a casual selection of her work. But someone caught her on her way to ride bikes with my Dad for his birthday last month - something he used to do daily, but she hasn't done since getting hit by a car at age 13... a pretty special birthday treat for him. I'll let Facebook decide how long it's available to show here.)

For our brief attempt at being commercial chocolateurs, she took
sumptuous process shots, jazzed up our table with bronze chiffon and
sparkle lights, and then presented us with matching chocolate-themed
aprons to wear at the event.

But my most wicked-favorite thing about Kacy (besides how much she and my dad care for each other), is her sense of humor.

She and Ernie are closer in age than either is to their spouse, and they can make each other laugh like few people I know. As a result, Kacy has gotten some truly charming photos of Ernie. Most other photographers capture dramatic tension, rugged intensity, self-criticism, or just a stern thousand-yard stare. But with Kacy around, you get to see in pictures some of the genuine fondness and delight he usually reserves for trusted family.

All in all, catastrophically mis-cast in the "wicked evil stepmother" role.

...

My mother-in-law and mother-out-law (not sure which is which) are very different from each other, but both are fun to be with.

Peggy enjoying Ernie and Erica's wedding

Peggy Myers is spunky, full of curiosity and enthusiasm, a stalwart Believer (though the church may vary, the faith remains strong). I love hearing her pronounce her delight in a new discovery, a charming shop, or a clever gardening trick: "I just think that's neat!" Peggy loves trying new restaurants, finding a tea shop we can share, learning more about local businesses, getting involved with neighbors, and introducing friends to each other. She has remained close friends with neighbors from our former shared address in Portland, and is probably the single most reliable person to give us a call and say "How was your day?"

Jeanine and Tai,
a rescued Arab horse.

Jeanine Wisner is enjoying retirement on her one-horse ranch, after a career as a small-business accountant, commercial fishing, and a memorable sojourn in Japan.

We definitely took advantage of her accounting advice early in the business setup.

It's nice to have someone right within walking distance for the occasional "girl chat." Sometimes with cream puffs, white wine, or a hot cup of tea. Sometimes with deep forays into social mores, politics, or the right relationship between humans and the rest of life on Earth.

When we're not being profound, we like cooking treats for each other (she makes wicked fried chicken; Ernie has perfected a honey-shrimp recipe that was one of her favorites at a Chinese restaurant; and I seem to be most popular lately for those cream puffs.) And swapping fiction novels for some mental R&R.

...

My sisters and sister-in-law are amazing mothers, too. As are many of our cousins and friends.

I continue to admire every gal who manages to wear the "mother" hat and be herself at the same time. It's not easy to be the focus of someone's fantasies, physical needs, and developing personality 24/7. Raising children is a collaborative art, with the parents, the child, extended family, and the larger society all playing a role.

Some writers have started wishing "happy mother's day" to men, especially those with the courage and stamina to take on the critically important, early-childhood parenting that remains a bastion of feminine influences and expectations. Most mothers do not have the police called on them when they sit on a park bench supervising their child's play, for example. Fathers, uncles, aunts, in-laws, grandparents, and friendly neighbors who participate in raising healthy children, alongside those iconic mothers young and old, create a richer life for the family and our future.

Sunday, May 15, 2016

Extra-emphatic smile lines and grey hair? The world's best babysitter, baking cookies, knitting booties, tending colic? "You drive like a grandma," implying excessive caution, or perhaps the terror of failing eyesight and reflexes?
A few people will have specific memories of meddling mentors, mother surrogates, or creative elders sweeping in like a fairy godmother.

I do have vivid memories of knitting and sewing projects with both my grandmothers, both for fun, and for events like weddings and school plays.

I also have is something that many people my age didn't. Our hallway wall sported portraits of my grandmother Mary in a lab coat, my great-grandmother with a superb horse. Grandma Enid's name once listed at #6 on the top-ten list for welding yardage in her Swan Island ship-yard.

Seeing those examples before I was old enough to read meant that I grew up without certain mental barriers, with a wider field to imagine my own future.

There was no sense that women couldn't, or shouldn't, or weren't capable, of ANYTHING. The unspoken assumptions that stopped many friends from considering a career in the sciences, or the trades, didn't seem to affect me in the same way.

The lab coat didn't stop GrandMary from being elegant when she wanted to be, either.

The other thing I remember about that hallway is that while Grandmary looks attentively elegant in her pearls, the expression is almost bored compared with the lab picture. In her lab coat, she is not looking at the camera - she is handling some test tubes in a rack, and smiling to herself.

The intrinsic pleasure of challenging work, done well, seems like a critical value to absorb in childhood (or as soon as possible thereafter).

I don't have a photo of Grandma Enid in her welding gear, but I have vivid mental pictures from her stories. Stunts like driving off a feckless teen admirer by shocking him with her welding stinger, if possible while he was standing in a puddle; racing across the logs in the parking lot for the carpool home; swapping jobs with some of the bigger welders and squeezing into interior spaces that were more accessible to her small frame, until the supervisors insisted that everyone do their fair share of all types of assignments.

Her talent for writing great stories made all her other careers come alive: being a 19-year-old high-production welder. A gifted seamstress whose family managed to publish her wedding banns on 2 weeks' notice, compelling her to come up with a wedding dress in the middle of what she thought was a normal 2-week visit home. Being a student of home architecture and a resourceful homemaker (she had to be, raising 4 children in 27 different homes while Grandpa's career on hydropower plants took them all over the Western USA).
She even wrote evocatively about the embarrassment of being a rural cousin bathing in a bucket during the Dust Bowl (it wiped out their indoor plumbing when the well filled with mud), and about the hallmarks of widowhood.

Through all the stories, there run threads of humor, resilience, and the pluck to make the best of any situation. It was my privilege to spend a couple of Grandma Enid's final years in close contact, as a part-time caregiver, and she is one of the most intimate ancestors in my personal pantheon.

Mycology, welding, and throwing convention to the winds. My great-grandmother Nan was known for
bypassing the hounds on a fox-hunt, and for starting a successful business after the family fortunes tanked in 1929. My great-great-grandmother accompanied her missionary husband to the Dakotas, figured out how to pluck chickens in kid opera gloves, and walked through a blizzard to give birth to her first child.

My lady ancestors always set their own definition for "ladylike."

My forefathers had their own creative quirks, but that's a story for another time.

Sunday, May 8, 2016

I have plenty of second-hand anecdotes and fragments of my early life, including snow bunnies and snow dolphins, mountain walks identifying iconic Northwest plants, and little sailboats made of Tupperware with clay mast-steps and leaf or paper sails in the rare California rains.

The earliest memory that I clearly recall is her absence.

While she was giving birth to my next sister, at home, I was sent to the neighbors across the way for the night. It may have been my first night away from home (surely at 2 years old, there would not have been many sleep-overs yet? Unless you count being born, myself, in a hospital).

I know this is my first memory, not my mother's, because I remember something she never knew: not fear, nor just separation or strangeness, but CANDY.

These well-intentioned neighbors had an ENORMOUS jar of COLORFUL candy - I believe it was something like Jelly Bellies. Throughout the night, I seem to remember being allowed to choose one more candy from the jar a COUNTLESS number of times. Countless as only unforseen abundance can be to a pre-literate child - a candy jar taller than oneself, like a magical apparition to a child accustomed to firm, healthful, and thrifty limits.

I don't know if I actually fell asleep. But regardless of the fussing and screaming that I'm sure they put up with, they would probably be pleased to know that the glow of hindsight they are remembered for their kindness and generosity (with CANDY!).

In later years, I have given up sugar and candy. And I have discovered and begun appreciate a number of things about my mother that were not obvious to a child's perspective.

A few highlights that I've been appreciating lately:

Brilliance: anyone who knows my mother will tell you she's highly intelligent. This intelligence lends itself to practical problem-solving, prudent planning, and an endless creative study of the world.

My mother is an avid student of languages, literature, and education in its original Greek sense: how to draw forth the best in people.

I had the luxury of being raised by an expert in child development and adolescent psychology, and later getting to "talk shop" around the table.

I think she would have been a darn good natural mother
without all that the extra book work, but the combination of practice
and theory made her both an excellent teacher and an excellent mother.

Although I'm sure I was occasionally sullen, I feel like I somehow missed my "rebel" phase due in part to her savvy and respectful handling of potential discord. Somehow it got into my head as early as 16 that my privileges came with responsibilities, and it would be... ill mannered? dishonorable? disloyal? to sneak out without permission after being trusted with the car keys and a room near the back door. I remember shocking my cousins at a lakeside vacation by letting my aunt know we were going for a midnight swim. It hadn't occurred to me that they would NOT inform their guardians about such things, or have their consent; and it hadn't occurred to them that I would need to be told not to "tell."

So many families seem to have a merry war between the generations; but somehow I felt like my mom and I were always on the same side.

In addition to speaking three or four languages well enough to be certified to teach them at the high school level, my mother routinely picks up another language, either for teaching, or for travel. After taking her translation abilities for granted in childhood, I didn't study these languages with her beyond a few months' dabbling. To my chagrin, at 22 years old, I finally realized I might one day want to travel without my mother along as a translator.

My mother also studied how to bring out the best in herself: to find a peaceful center from which to ride out life's troubles. God knows there were many hurts, and I know more of them now, despite both my parents' relative success in shielding us from them early on. I remember her practising stretches from aikido class, and showing me how to find lines of force, or do rolls on the living room carpet. She taught me a number of meditation and comfort techniques that I still use today: massage or back-scratches, melting oneself from the toes all the way up to the head, imagining one's 'house of the soul', poetry and prayers, counting one's blessings.

My mother was young, and has always remained beautiful. I was born when
she was 21 years old. It's
strange to think of myself as "older than my mother," though of course
in another sense that will never happen. But now that 21-year-olds seem young to me, I notice a number of remarkable ways my mother was mature for her age.
- the courage to set her own path: perhaps not surprising in a child whose family marched her up the glacier-peaked Cascades at age 12, she knew in her teens that she wanted both a career and a family, and undertook both with great success. When she married my Catholic father, the bishops had their hands full dickering over her conversion. She always held authorities to a higher standard of integrity, with the same gentle firmness with which she confessed her "disappointment" in our childish ill deeds.
- the grace to be an excellent mother, and to accept help from others, after her own parents' untimely deaths. Her father died suddenly when she was 13; her mother died at 59 before my brother was born. Even before Grandmary passed away, my mother was on firmly friendly terms with my father's mother Enid, and I remember her later treating her as "Mom," a mentor and confidante. They remained steadfast friends, if a bit more circumspect, even after my parent's divorce 24 years later.
- the brilliance and perseverance to complete a Stanford bachelor's degree in 3 years, and follow up with a Masters while raising 4 children;
- and the practical sensibility to fix a garden gate, mend or sew as needed, and generally apply her gifts in a spirit of generous service.

The Spider Says: But was she a "perfect" mother? Nobody is, of course.
If I had to pick a tragic flaw in my mother, it might be her self-imposed standards of excellence.

There is no cost to tickle a happy baby; it's emotionally rewarding and politically correct. My mother can coo at babies with the best of them, but hand her a fussy one, and not only will she take it - she will most likely change the diaper or find the pinching pin, rather than just hand it back.

Being a diaper-changer in a cooing world can get exhausting. If she can't be at her best, with enough energy to help, my mother will withdraw for some quiet time to herself. It's usually healthy self-preservation, unless it's not.

When my parents divorced, I realized that I could not remember hearing them fight or argue through most of my childhood. And I suddenly realized that might not be such a good thing as I had imagined it to be. Maybe someone had tacitly turned a blind eye, or given up on some things, somewhere. Maybe some of those things were important enough to fight for.

I remember actively seeking out other families who could indulge in a good loud fight without threatening their relationship, to see how they did it. (They did it in various ways, not necessarily any healthier than my parent's intense "discussions." But I did learn there are ways to fight fair, and am gradually learning to practice them in my own marriage.)

I'm grateful to have absorbed the practice of lifelong learning, of delight in words and ideas, and the pragmatism to cope with whatever life throws at you (while doing your best to provide fairness and decency for others).

And I'm extremely grateful that my own parents are still around for weekly phone chats and visits, so that I can enjoy the beloved sound of my mother's voice, or the imprompetu intimacy of a walk in the rain.

So happy Mother's Day, Mom. A virtual walk in the woods, with May flowers, especially for you.

One is coastal changes. Ernie is still passionate about the massive changes that are happening, and likely to increase, along our beautiful coastlines. It's not just a question of who gets beachfront property; the coast is always eroding, but even a small change in sea levels could massively change the current coastlines, affecting agriculture, fisheries, harbors, tides and currents, and the weather.

While the weatherman may not be able to tell you months in advance which particular spring day will be fair for your wedding, you used to have pretty good confidence in which month to plant peas vs. beans, or use a tide chart to time your way through a tight spot, and know when and where to expect tuna, salmon, or crab season. Changing ocean currents sometimes move fish runs hundreds or thousands of miles off course (if the fish are surviving at all, which we devoutly hope they are).

In the face of all this change, reclaiming predictability is pretty attractive. I think that's part of what drove our ancestors to make a religion out of calendars in the first place - Stonehenge, the Celtic sun-mazes, Mayan temples, the Egyptian pyramids, built on carefully-surveyed celestial axes and bearing enduring witness to the passage of the seasons as well as the ambitions of mortal man.

This is not the first time change has confronted us. Our ancestors lived through ice ages, droughts, floods, fire, and plague; what's a few breadbaskets turning into fjords compared to historic miseries? But you can see where there is a very strong human resistance to change, and a craving for predictability and reliable rules for dealing with complex things like weather, growing conditions, and morality.

One of the most popular, and misunderstood, elements in nature are the effects of the moon and tides on the living, breathing Earth. (By which I mean the biosphere: the plants, animals, soils, swamps, reefs, and skintillions of tiny unseen beings who make up the growing, living, dying, feeling skin of this blue planet.)

Many people understand the tides as caused by the moon pulling on the earth. That's somewhat true (both moon and sun affect tides). But I think we assume the timing is simpler than it actually is, because we are used to relying on the moon and sun as the main cog-wheels of our calendar.

The waxing and waning of the moon is a great way to set rendezvous and festival dates in low-tech societies, because everyone can synchronize their schedule without a watch alarm. Rendezvous are not just for wild parties or philosophical societies: the longer "day" can be used for coordinated work like plowing, haying, and harvest home. Some almanacs or systems such as biodynamics give ever-more-complex ways to organize the growing calendar, defining certain days and even hours as "seed days," "root times," and fallow times.

Having a schedule that reminds you what kinds of activities you might need to do this week, and helps you pick a time to do them, is very useful, especially in a situation where your normal instincts about weather can lead to undue optimism and early planting.

However, I get a little twitchy when people justify these schedules because of the "tides" or the "pull of the moon." The
majority of calendars reflect the waning and waxing light, and basically ignore the tidal forces. (The full moon and new moon are both aligned with the sun to produce higher and lower tides, compared with the out-of-alignment quarter moons).
It's conceivable that the moonlight may affect some types of plants.

But what really prickles me is that this simplified "explanation" for lunar influence, "just like it pulls the tides," ignores how complex and rich a pattern the tides actually are. The tides are different from one place to another, even from one side of an island to another.

If you don't have any idea of the full complexity of the tides, which after all are basically just sloshing water, how much more are you likely to mis-understand the intricate forces that coax many different kinds of plants to their best growth?

People with woo-woo garden theories nevertheless often have spectactular gardens, possibly due to caring enough to pay close attention to their plants. "Listening" and "talking" to plants, whether there is any scientific basis for it or not, seems to open the mind up to notice what's needed and support the plants in a timely way. Sceptics who don't garden are not well-positioned to offer advice. But it's still annoying to be quoted pseudo-scientific justifications for folk practices, whether they work or not. There's been a lot of bad science done around biodynamics, in particular: biased studies or compilations that only list favorable outcomes; claiming statistical significance by growing large numbers of seedlings at the same time, but without controlling for other variables like weather or temperature, or by comparison to any other years. Bad science doesn't disprove a pet theory, but it doesn't prove it either, and it often grates on science-minded ears as an annoying waste of time.

I am not a biology buff, and my garden is far from exemplary.
But I have been learning about the tides, and it's fascinating.

If
you look at tide tables, the most extreme tides are generally at the
new moon, when moon and sun's pull line up. These will be the "spring"
tides, both highest and lowest tides. The full moon has relatively
regular tides. During the quarters in between you can get uneven tides
where one low or high will be different than the other for that day.

The
tides don't actually race around the world keeping up with the moon -
water waves simply can't move that fast, they would have to go over a thousand miles an hour. Instead, it's more like a dancer spinning plates, where repeated motions
create a sloshing effect. If you want to play around with this, the easiest (and most fun) way is to sit or lie in the bathtub, then rhythmically flap one hand back and forth in place. Sometimes nothing much happens. Sometimes if you hit the right rhythm, the whole tub starts sloshing water out both ends. If you shift position (sit up, or lie down), the rhythms change. Your body is like the coastline and undersea shapes that define the basins, or "bathyscape." Your flapping hand is like the regular pull of sun and moon, working the waters into a sloshing rhythm.

The ocean tides get nudged into circular
currents, or sloshing extremes, or pivot points of near-perfect stillness, based on the shapes of the continents and ocean basins. Some areas, like Alaska or New Zealand, have extreme tides. Some,
like the Gulf of Mexico and the Mediterranean,
have almost none (that's part of why hurricane storm surges are so
devastating in the Gulf, their coast is not adapted to sloshing water).

The tides have patterns, and the patterns tend to mostly repeat with
the lunar cycles, but they are a complex dance. The tides don't simply 'wax and wane' like
the Moon's light. The ocean does get pulled by the moon, but it doesn't bulge at full moon
and shrink during the new moon. There's always the same amount of
water, and it returns roughly to its own level one way or another.
You can have big influences due to current weather (storm tides), undersea earthquakes, or big ice-sheet or land slides even. "Tidal waves" are more often called "tsunami" now by scientists: these are seismic-driven waves due to earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, or big land-slides, with no tidal influence involved. However, tsunami are big and broad, and they drop and flood into harbors like a very fast and extreme tide, rather than being a surface-level curling wave like wind-driven fetch. Storm waves batter and froth; "tidal waves" can funnel into certain harbors like a tidal bore, as if the ocean had changed its mind about where to allow a shoreline.

The tides are wild and mysterious, and hard to predict without a chart. Those charts are based on years and years of experience, records going back centuries for many ports. But once you are tuned into your local tides, you may be able to use your own observations to take a guess at the current tide based on the time of day and phase of the moon. I feel pretty good if I can get within an hour or two this way - that's close enough to schedule a harvesting trip or keep me out of trouble on a coastal hike. The tide charts are way more reliable, but it's worth trying to learn the local patterns if you're interested, in case you are ever caught without a current chart.

If the tides don't line up from one coast to another, I don't imagine that all plants will respond the same way to the "lunar pull" across continents and climate zones. Or for that matter, that they would respond more strongly to "lunar pull" than to the sun's stronger pull, or the Earth's even stronger gravitational pull. If I had to guess, I would imagine that the plant feels a very slight fluctuation in the earth's effective gravity.
If
you're just talking about upward 'pull,' the sun has 175 times more
pull than the moon. And they are both pulling on us at all times,
sometimes up and sometimes down. It's just relatively the same across
all the earth. The daily small difference in pull, as our side of the
Earth turns toward or away from the sun, is about 44% as much as the
moon's difference in pull.http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/tide.html.

Factors like temperature have a much more measurable effect on plant
growth (and insect and fish maturation - to the point where hatcheries
and stream volunteers talk about "degree-days" to maturity). Weather affects temperature. Some animals definitely can feel and respond to barometric pressure, as do some types of plants (Ernie has a "weather leg" that pains him with pressure changes, and he recalls some type of orchid that opens and closes with changes in the barometric pressure).

Some flowers called "moonflowers" are just round and white; a few of these (and others) bloom mainly at night. A very few are said to bloom mainly during the full moon. However, there's a good argument to be made that this behavior could evolve to attract specialized night-flying pollinators, like the more common night-blooming behavior. Some pollinators may be particularly active or accurate in finding the flowers with more moonlight. The idea that it's moonlight, rather than some kind of gravitational pull, that sets the cues for this dance would be reinforced if the plants could be mis-cued by artificial light, or by variations in day length. There are a handful of such species I found mentioned online (on a less-than-impressive eHow post , or the more ordinary evening- and night-blooming flowers listed here on Ava's Flowers http://blog.avasflowers.net/flowers-that-bloom-in-the-moonlight). All three of those said to bloom best in the full moon (datura inoxia, one of several plants commonly called "moonflower;" night-blooming jasmine or cestrum nocturnum, and night scented stock (Matthiola longipetala) are tropical or subtropical plants, which prefer roughly 6- to-12-hour days with warm or hot temperatures. The last one is a desert plant blooming mainly in spring and fall (12-hour days).

I'm impressed by serious gardeners in any case - and these plants appear to have a lot of strict requirements besides the lavishly regular lunar cycle.

However, one thing that excellent gardeners often share, and I fall short, is a reliable sense of time and time management. If gardeners sometimes build mystical stories around their all-important calendar or almanac, a little poetry to get the juices flowing and help you stick to your plan, there's nothing wrong with that (unless it makes you less open to reliable, proven methods that might be of more help). So if a lunar planting, weeding, sprouting, and rooting cycle is working for you, keep doing
it.

Lunar cycles are a good predictor of changes in animal
activity levels (including humans), possibly due to availability of
nocturnal light and enhanced twilight. This light/activity connection, which also affects a LOT of nocturnal pollinators, could be one reason why some very successful gardening methods and guides have used the moon. Full moons have been used historically for extended work hours during harvest, and for festivals where participants might travel and celebrate longer together without fear of being caught in the dark o the way home.

Many gardeners are women, or live with women; our menstrual cycles famously synchronize with the moon. It is worth tracking our own cycles. Any given woman may feel more productive in certain lunar phases than others - though I would expect this to vary person to person.
I have had some difficult years when somehow EVERY heavy-lifting workshop and over half our air-travel dates managed to line up with the wrong "time of the month."
While some ancient cultures put taboos on menstruating women participating in certain activities (cooking, handling sacred items, etc), these may be related to harmonious concentration, intense arguments, or the possibility of blood stains attracting scavengers. In the modern context, menstruation cycles can usually be managed, they're just an extra burden to bear while working on a time-sensitive project.

However, there's one more reason why lunar cycles might be a popular element in garden planning guides and almanacs.
The moon has strong mythological connotations, and has been part of both calendars and legends for longer than we can remember. It's attractive; it's sexy; it's mysterious; it's a little risque. And in the world of marketing, sex sells. A calendar that marks out the full moon, or gives poetic lunar instructions for getting through the tasks of the week, might simply be more interesting.

I'd rather take my poetry at full throttle, with moon and flowers fleshed out in beauty, scents, strong feelings, and layered symbolism reflecting my human needs and longings. And I'd rather let my science explanations stand or fall on their own merits, humble as science should be, proven or disproven by results over time.

If the moonflower likes moonlight best, so be it. If it's happy with a 12-hour daylight cycle, a little evening coolth, and maybe a grow-light boost when I want to party out of season, then we can have fun together that way too.

And if planting your seeds on Monday and Tuesday this week, but not until Thursday or Friday of next week, works for you, then do it.

I find that my seeds get planted "now" or not at all. There are enough challenges in semi-arid gardening while working out-of-town gigs; I don't need a mystical schedule to tell me I'm doing it wrong.
From what I've seen, plants grow very well for people who pay attention to their individual needs and their common routines (like water, temperature, sun and shade). They can also grow well for people who believe in all kinds of moons and fairies, as long as they also get out in the garden regularly and give the plans good physical care.

But for those who, like me, are juggling too many interests and obligations to regularize our garden time, there's a risk that a demanding garden schedule could become an excuse not to plant anything at all.

If you don't have any of those challenges, and you see some difference between Tuesday's and Thursday's plants despite perfect control of water and temperature, then you have the luxury of refining your methods on your own terms. I have had a few personal experiences with "talking to plants," or more
specifically asking permission and listening for an answer, that take
the edge off my skepticism about this whole sort of thing. But I'm still

I'm a
sailor in training, and an incurable science geek. Being 'in tune with
nature' feels good in any case, but it matters even more if you're
surfing the tides in and out of harbors, and trying to keep
track of wind and current effects on your course. Sailors can get
pretty picky about the accuracy of their nature-based information.

Sunday, April 10, 2016

All the Goodies!

It is hard to keep straight all these Kickstarter reward packages.
What is everyone else doing?

The most popular reward level is $35. At that level, you get:

"The Book"
+ the "Fire Starter Rewards"
In other words, you get:

- The Rocket Mass Heater Builder's Guide, paperback first edition

- The Art of Fire ebook

- Fire Science DVD, streaming version

- Care and Feeding of Rocket Mass Heaters micro-doc

- Builder's Guide to Mud ebook

- 3 mini-stoves under $3 ebook

- 3 mini-stoves under $10 ebook

- Simple Shelter ebook

- Teeny Tiny Mass Heater Plans

- A new DIY project each month for 2016 (8 projects from May to December)

- Recipes for Ernie's fabulous chocolate truffles

More than double the value of the book.

A lot of folks are upgrading to the $50+ levels, to get the stretch goal bonus items for serious builders
(Bitter Lessons eBook and Innovators' Cookbook). Or maybe they are just stretching toward Shrimp, Fish, a Fat Rabbit, Mysterious Manifolds, Rocket Wood Cook Stoves, and

Rocket Wood Cook Stoves and Heaters: The Cleanest, Greenest, Most Elegant Wood Burning Stoves in the World

Delivering all these new goodies is going to keep us busy from now til Christmas.

Saturday, April 9, 2016

This is a tiny graphic of the Fire Starter rewards, for visual people. Every backer at $10 or higher gets all these things, plus the specific stuff it mentions in the reward level, plus stretch goal bonuses.

There are going to be a LOT of stretch goal bonus eBooks, because we have hit a LOT of stretch goals.

Shrimp: Compact cooking rocket
The outside looks almost normal.
Inside, there is a 4" batchbox,
which gives a 6"w/12"d/9"h oven;
a curled-up heat riser (!) and insulation.
Thick steel tray holds oven heat.
Optional range cover traps some heat
(like a Dutch oven).
For tight clearances (insulated)
the outside dimens. may be about
15" wide by 24" tall, and 24" deep.
With a rear chimney port it could
possibly be coupled to a bell for
a mass-heater extension - first,
we must see how it burns.

Teeny Tiny Mass Heater Plans. Bitter Rocket Mass Heaters: Lessons from the Dark Side (or something like that)
The Heat Riser Cookbook, and Innovator's Cookbook, and if we hit our next goal we also release Mysterious Manifolds.

I spent Hour 52 to Hour 50 doing a concept drawing for the Shrimp on a brown paper bag this morning.

I'm adding the Shrimp as an unofficial stretch goal at $40,000.
(I'm planning to finish prototyping it during the Alternative Tech course in June, so you can always come and see it then.
If we cross $40,000, I will make sure all backers get the plans and progress notes, as well as two other plan sets to fulfill the Teeny Tiny Mass Heaters goal from before.)

Also, we have some beautiful rocket kitchens from recent years, with a quick online search. I'd like to do an investigative tour of those, and get the inside scoop from from their builders, as our pie-in-the-sky $50,000 stretch goal.

Batch-box cooking rocket in soapstone (by Hendrik)

Brazilian kitchen with two Plancha-style rockets

I love the creative inspiration, and this is a new milestone for me as a small business proprietor. The potential budget for this year's projects is heartening.

Ernie was disappointed to realize we don't get to keep ALL the money - a lot of it goes to pay for books, shipping, content delivery, payment processing fees, and other costs. Yet this is still a HUGE step forward in our goals for this year.

As we sell more books at once, we also get a better per-book rate from the publisher, which adds up to thousands of extra dollars (beyond the margins we calculated to conservatively cover all the costs).

Thank you to everyone who has supported and endorsed and edited and encouraged this project.

We have been trying for years to convey how warm and decadent it really feels to enjoy one of these heated benches, plus the radiant warmth from that blackened-steel barrel.

It rarely comes across in pictures.

It becomes more obvious when you hear about Mongolian women sitting on the bench and giggling together as their undersides warm up.

Or our friends from a nature education center report, "you should warn people these things are an aphrodisiac." They had 3 new pregnancies the winter after installing their first rocket mass heater. (Apparently, the ladies on staff had been tolerating a chilly office and cold feet for a LONG time.)

A few years later, the same conversation led to a creative photography session between two talented ladies, and the raw image here, showing a lovely mama enjoying warm cob in Montana in October, without a stitch on but her hair.

Not Safe For Work. You been warned.Some call it Art, others may find it objectionable.

She looks pretty comfy, doesn't she?

The lovely and talented Katelin, besides being a figure model,
is raising a wonderful son, and can cook Paleo meals for 50 in an
ordinary home kitchen with a rocket spare-burner out back.

She had the
courage to put up with some flack about this already, and confirmed she
was comfortable with releasing the pictures. If you choose to look,
please be mature about it.

Katelin and photographer Priscilla Smith (www.priscillasmithphotography.com) created this photo to convey the earthy sensuality of
the warm bench. I suspect Priscilla will work this photo over at some
point, and turn it into grainy, painterly art - check out her other
pieces if you want a lovely visual break, mostly SFW and sometimes surreal.

Ernie also used to model, incidentally, for art classes.
Maybe I should get Priscilla to take Ernie nude pics on the same rocket, for equal rights.
...

OK, Mom, I have officially sold out. Not sure how much farther we can go to demonstrate the luxurious comfort and clean-living benefits of these heaters.

Luckily for you, in 48 hours we go back to our "normal" lives. We'll stop saying "Kickstarter" and post more pics of me in gumboots stocking the woodshed, baking duck-shaped cream puffs, practicing tadelakt on rocket hammam (sauna) benches in a Moroccan village.

Friday, April 1, 2016

The obvious answer is to double down and teach a lot of rockety stuff, maybe cash in on the book promotions by starting some online courses or something.

But we're your crazy R&D people. We like developing new things more than we like marketing proven stuff.

One thing I'm excited about this year is learning more tech tricks.

Ryan Chivers polishing a tadelakt bowl (Denver Post)

I got to take my first tadelakt course this winter. Ironically, I may get to use it for the first time on a return trip to Morocco. (Yeah, they could get the expensive guy in from Marrakech... or they could see if the American novice can pull it off, third-hand from Canada and Colorado back to its ancient origins.)

One of the project ideas is a rocket hammam (like a Turkish bath, a heated steam-bathing room).

I am so excited by the idea of a soapy-smooth sauna-like bench, which if it all goes well would be waterproof enough for anyone. I am eager to try, despite my very beginner experience with the tadelakt process.
...

I would also like to stop waiting around with my hands in my pockets when I need help welding or pipe-fitting on the stove prototypes.

If I had realized earlier that I would want this skill, I could have learned from my late grandmother Enid, who was a top-grade welder in Portland's Swan Island shipyards during the war effort. (She claims she only made the top-six list for her yard because "they didn't know if Enid was a man's name or not.")

Or I could have asked my father-in-law before his eye problem which left him, as he puts it, "blind in one eye and can't see out the other." He is a bit embarrassed by the rough quality of his work nowadays, and I guess that makes me embarrassed to ask him (he puts in a ton of help on our projects anyway, whether we ask or not).

I bet it was Priscilla Smith
who made him look all dreamy like this...
big vision, black fingerprints,
that's Tim all the way.

Between Morocco and our book events, the PDC is a conflict for me. But if I squeeze, I can get in there for almost the entire AT course. Get that Shrimp heater prototype of mine up and running, and maybe we could even plumb and seal the darned hot tub. Or build a new darned hot tub (if you have never tried to 'rescue' someone else's abused redwood, it's a real tragedy). Maybe I can tadelakt the hot tub! But wrestling with a hot tub all week could be a waste of time, when there's so much else to explore.

Others will be presenting solar, power generation, pumps, all kinds of DIY tech. I can earn my keep with some rockety demos, and maybe show off my softer side with some fiber-based structural tech like wattle work, pole lashings, sewing. (I did learn that from Gran'ma Enid, at least!)
Or bring the physics side with passive solar, heat transfer, simple machines. We haven't hit the details real hard yet, just excited to get the team together!

So jump on that early bird registration, and convince these Australians we want them out here already. They've got a superb forest gardener, and Howard Story of Permaculture Asia, also lined up for the courses.

...

Back to the Kickstarter: To keep knocking down those stretch goals, please keep sharing. We have 10 days left, and while the initial popularity has been amazing, it does take creative repetition to keep bringing in the newbies right up to the last bell.

We've just announced our stretch goal for the $25,000 mark: if we reach that level, we'll write up a brand-new e-book on a topic we don't normally share with the public: Bitter Lessons from Rocket Mass Heaters: Hopes, Misconceptions, and Faceplants. Or something like that. Basically, all the 20-20 hindsight, terrifying prototype moments, and surprise errors behind the simple-sounding rules in the Builder's Guide.

Serious builders, given a chance to set down together, swap these stories of nightmare jobs and near misses like a private currency. So we're planning to put that bonus out for backers at $50 and up. We figure that's the "serious builder," book-plus level, where you appreciate our work that much more because you have seen the dirty-hands workshop videos, or maybe have built a few home-built projects yourself.
And in any case, those backers have gotten themselves a copy of the "how-to book," can't blame us if they build a "bitter" project for their own stubborn reasons.

We have more than enough personal embarrassments to fill the whole book, but I'm considering letting our top boosters and colleagues submit a story or two, just to add to the feel of it being a coffee-klatch. We certainly won't name anyone else's names without their express permission.

As a sort of bad-planning April fools' joke on myself, the North American book is going to print this weekend, a full week before the Kickstarter closes. I'd love to be sure we can order 500 to 1000 books, for a much better per-book rate, as soon as possible.

So please send in all that last-minute support you can muster, and consider April 3 as this week's "last minute."

The Batch-Box and Sidewinder rocket designers are turning out some interesting bells, benches, and cooktop masonry cubes, as I showed toward the end of the October 2015 post, "Pyronauts in Montana."
We know of a handful of classic rocket mass heaters (J-style firebox, barrel and all) passing inspection, and plenty of other DIY masonry heaters as well - reports filtering in from Oregon, Georgia, New York, Michigan, BC, Ontario, Vermont... the precedent is mounting.

For the present, however, the vast majority of DIY builders are choosing the path of least resistance, and not asking permission. That's a risky path for people who have a mortgage, and may be obliged to maintain home insurance. Some will build in an outbuilding or greenhouse instead of the main house, losing much of the people-warming efficiency that we're after.

Let's encourage each other with success stories.
If your DIY masonry heater was approved, please tell!
If you've had a productive conversation with local officials, that stopped short of official approval, or led to a different design choice, we'd like to hear about that too.(We've had at least 4 after-the-fact inspectors give an unofficial response of, "Cool. I have no problem with this," and no further action taken, even if they weren't quite clear on the legal process for official approval.)

We would love to sell 1000 copies by April 1, and get our per-book costs way down for this first edition printing.

We are looking forward to signing and hand-delivering these first-edition books to our backers in the Pacific Northwest, and around the world.

If you're interested in helping us, please spread the word. Consider signing up as a booster to receive a referral bonus with every pledge you send our way. We did the math; the per-book cost makes a bigger difference to
our budget than the referral incentive - so please sell books and claim the bounty!

Calling EU, Commonwealth, and International Builders

Adiel Shnior came from Israel to study with us,
then took the skills back to his local team,
with great results.

We have an opportunity to write an EU appendix for our book - but it needs to be turned around FAST!

Physics works the same across most of the world, but building materials and local regulations can be very different.

If you are a builder or future builder from the UK, Europe, Australia, or New Zealand (or anywhere outside North America),